SAN DIEGO (FOX 5/KUSI) — If home is truly where the heart is, then Rocio Delgado’s home is in Puerto Rico.

“I grew up in Ciales. It’s a town in the middle of the island, green, full of mountains. It’s a very pretty town that I invite everybody to have the opportunity to go visit,” Delgado said.

Everything in her house, from the sugar cane painting to the cafecito, reminds her of the island.

“The best way to drink the coffee,” she said as she warmed milk on the stove.

But, she doesn’t live in Puerto Rico anymore.

“Especially in the beginning, it was super hard because my family is there, my friends as well,” Delgado said.

She moved to San Diego more than 20 years ago to continue her education. “That was a hard transition.”

Through her time in her art studio, you can see the longing to connect with her homeland in each brush stroke. “Painting was a way to heal,” she said. “I feel like it was a therapy.”

That feeling produced her painting: “Corazon Boricua.”

“I let myself go in a way,” Delgado said.

She painted the blue, white, and red heart with oil on a large canvas.

“I feel that the heart is not broken. It’s just expanding,” she said, adding it symbolizes the resilience of Latinos.

That’s what caught the attention of the San Diego Padres.

“They sent us a deck with several different design options, things that are important to the culture,” said Emily Wittig, the Vice President of Marketing with the San Diego Padres.

In collaboration with the award-winning artist, the Padres will feature her artwork on the limited-edition game hat during their fourth Puerto Rican Heritage Game.

“I was finishing my heart, and that’s the one that they chose,” Delgado said.

What started as a painting on her wall became a digital graphic design she shared with the Padres.

This hat became a reality after several drafts — a tangible way to share her culture at the Puerto Rican Heritage Game.

“We want it to be authentic,” Wittig said. “We want it to be true to the culture, so it’s important for us to work with these local community groups to see what’s important to them.”

The team designed every part of the hat with intention.

“Our Puerto Rican celebration hat is the colors of the Puerto Rican flag,” Wittig said.

It includes authentic details in even unexpected ways.

“The fun thing that people might not notice right away, but on the inside we have the coqui, the tiny frogs, which are so cute, so it’s a really fun nod to Puerto Rico while also still celebrating and showing your Padres pride,” Wittig said, showing the details of the hat.

The Padres donate $5 from every ticket sold to the House of Puerto Rico, which Carmen Acevedo says keeps the cottage operating.

“It’s also going to keep the international cottages alive for the rest of the generations,” Acevedo said.

Acevedo says the cultural museum relies solely on donations, receiving more than $4,000 from the game last year.

“This one is a fundraiser with a lot of fun,” Acevedo said.
Delgado is one of thousands of Puerto Ricans who left the island in recent years.

“I was thinking it was going to be a short transition, just come study, having an opportunity to do that, and come back, but things change,” Delgado said.

According to the Pew Research Center, since 2004, more than 600,000 Puerto Ricans have left the island to live in the mainland United States, so events like this offer a chance to reconnect with other Puerto Ricans.

“We want people to feel included and welcomed here,” Wittig said.

While Delgado no longer calls Puerto Rico her physical home, you can see the home in her heart through the ‘Corazon Boricua.’

“The Padres are doing something so nice to recognize the Puerto Rican community in San Diego, and not too many teams do that,” Delgado said.

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• A megatsunami is an incredibly large wave of about 100 meters (328 ft) or more. These huge waves are often triggered by events such as landslides.
• In August 2025, a megatsunami in Alaska happened when a landslide entered a fjord next to South Sawyer Glacier. The event generated a wave 1,580 feet (481 meters) high.
• Scientists believe a warning system could help alert any people in the area. It would be based on seismic activity in the area.

By Michael E. West, University of Alaska Fairbanks and Ezgi Karasözen, University of Alaska Fairbanks

2025 Alaska megatsunami shows need for warning system

On the evening of August 9, 2025, passengers on the Hanse Explorer yacht finished taking selfies and videos of Alaska’s South Sawyer Glacier, and the ship headed back down the fjord. Twelve hours later, a landslide from the adjacent mountain unexpectedly collapsed into the fjord, initiating the second-highest tsunami in recorded history.

We conduct research on earthquakes and tsunamis at the Alaska Earthquake Center. And one of us serves as Alaska state seismologist. In a new study with colleagues, we detail how that landslide sent water and debris 1,580 feet (481 meters) up the other side of the fjord. That’s higher than the top floor of the Taipei 101 skyscraper. And then the tsunami continued down Tracy Arm. The force of the water stripped the fjord’s walls down to bare rock.

The 2025 Alaska megatsunami

It was just after 5 o’clock in the morning on a dreary day. And fortunately, no ships were nearby. In the months after, some cruise lines started avoiding Tracy Arm. However, the conditions that led to this event are not at all unique to this fjord.

Landslides are common in the coastal mountains of Alaska. In these areas, rapid uplift – caused by tectonic forces and long-term ice loss – converges with the erosive forces of precipitation and moving glaciers. But a curious pattern has emerged in recent years: Multiple major landslides have occurred precisely at the terminus (end point) of a retreating glacier.

Though the mechanics are still poorly understood, these mountains appear to become unstable when the ice disappears. When the landslide hits the water, the momentum of millions of tons of rock is transferred into tsunami waves.

This same phenomenon is playing out from Alaska to Greenland and Norway, sometimes with deadly consequences. Across the Arctic, countries are trying to come to terms with this growing hazard. The options are not attractive: avoid vast swaths of coastline, or live with a poorly understood risk. We believe there is an obvious role for alert systems. But only if scientists have a better understanding of where and when landslides are likely to occur.

Signs that a landslide might be coming

The Tracy Arm landslide is a powerful example.

The landslide occurred in August, when warm ocean waters and heavier precipitation favor both glacier retreat and slope failure. The glacier below the landslide area had experienced rapid calving: large chunks of ice breaking off and falling into the water. And it had retreated more than a third of a mile in the two months prior. Heavy rain had been falling. Rain enters fractures in the mountain and pushes them closer to failure by increasing the water pressure in cracks.

Most provocative are the thousands of small seismic tremors that emanated from the area of the slide in the days prior to the mountainside collapsing.

We believe that this combination of signs would have been sufficient to issue progressive alerts to any ships in the vicinity and homes and businesses that could have been harmed by a tsunami at least a day prior to the failure … had a monitoring program existed.

Escalating alerts are used for everything from terrorism and nuclear plant safety to avalanches and volcanic unrest. They don’t remove the risk. But they do make it easier for people to safely coexist with hazards.

For example, though people are still killed in avalanches, alert systems have played an essential role in making winter backcountry travel safer for more people. The collapse at Tracy Arm demonstrates what could be possible for landslides.

What an alert system could look like

We believe that the combination of weather and rapid glacier retreat in early August 2025 was likely sufficient to issue an alert notifying people that the hazard may be temporarily elevated in a general area. On a yellow-orange-red scale, this would be a yellow alert.

In the hours prior to the landslide, the exponential increase in seismic events and telltale transition to what is known as seismic tremor – a continuous “hum” of seismic energy – were sufficient to communicate a time-sensitive warning for a specific region.

These observations, recorded as a byproduct of regional earthquake monitoring, warranted an “orange” alert noting immediate concern. The signs were arguably sufficient to recommend keeping boats and ships out of the fjord.

Alerts are possible

Our research over the past few years has demonstrated that once a large landslide has started, it is possible to detect and measure the event within a couple of minutes. In this amount of time, seismic waves in the surrounding area can indicate the rough size of the landslide and whether it occurred near open water.

A monitoring program that could quickly communicate this would be able to issue a red alert, signaling an event in progress.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s tsunami warning program has spent decades fine-tuning rapid message dissemination. A warning system would have offered little help for ships in the immediate vicinity, but it could have provided perhaps 10 minutes of warning for those who rode out the harrowing tsunami farther away.

There is no landslide monitoring system operating yet at this scale in the U.S. Building one will require cooperation across state and federal agencies, and strengthened monitoring and communication networks. Even then, it will not be fail-proof.

Understanding risk, not removing it

Alert systems do not remove the risk entirely, but they are a better option than no warning at all. Over time, they also build awareness as communities and visitors get used to thinking about these hazards.

Many of the most alluring places on Earth come with significant hazards. Arctic fjords are among them. The same processes that create this hazard – glacier retreat, steep terrain, dynamic geology – are also what make these landscapes so compelling. The mix of glaciers, ice-choked waters and steep mountains is exactly what draws people to these places. People will continue to visit and experience them.

The question is not whether these places should be avoided altogether, but how to help people make more informed decisions. We believe that stronger geophysical and meteorological monitoring, coupled with new research and communication channels, is the first step.

On August 9, visitors unknowingly passed through a landscape on the cusp of failure. An alert system might have given tour companies and people in the area the information they needed to make more informed choices and avoid being caught by surprise.

Michael E. West, Director of the Alaska Earthquake Center and State Seismologist, University of Alaska Fairbanks and Ezgi Karasözen, Research Seismologist, Alaska Earthquake Center, University of Alaska Fairbanks

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Bottom line: A 2025 Alaska megatsunami sent a 1,580-foot wave of water up the Tracy Arm fjord. It revealed the need for a landslide-triggered tsunami warning system.

Read more: Landslide-triggered tsunamis becoming more common